


Born to Lose, Bound for Glory

by doyouhearthunder



Category: Night In The Woods (Video Game)
Genre: BIG SPOILERS so don't read this if you haven't finished the game, Gen, a small piece of the life and times of Casey Hartley, as remembered by his two closest friends
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-01
Updated: 2017-04-01
Packaged: 2018-10-13 19:23:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,437
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10520220
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doyouhearthunder/pseuds/doyouhearthunder
Summary: "We did him a favor."The words stabbed through Mae’s confused and exhausted mind and lodged themselves in her soul like a splinter.





	

“The Hartley kid?  All he was gonna contribute to society, ‘cept a buncha kids growin’ up with no dad, was a rap sheet a mile long, before whatever sad end he’d wind up at.  We did him a favor.”  
  
_  
We did him a favor.  
_  
The words stabbed through Mae’s confused and exhausted mind and lodged themselves in her soul like a splinter.  It couldn’t be true, could it? Casey couldn’t be…  
  
When she’d returned to Possum Springs and found him missing, she’d assumed, like Gregg, that he had hopped a train and taken his chance to get out of the little dead-end town, like he’d always wanted.  And yes, she had worried about him, but she’d at least been able to imagine him out there somewhere, living.  But now…he wasn’t just gone, he was… _gone_.  One day, alive in the world.  The next…not.  Absent.  Disappeared down into a hole, leaving a hole in his wake.  A hole in the world.  A hole in her life.  
  
Casey Hartley had been her friend.  One of the best she’d ever had, aside from Gregg and Bea.  She’d grown up with him, survived high school with him, laughed and lived and done a lot of really dumb shit with him.  He’d been reckless, rebellious, an academic underachiever from a struggling family, brimming with pent-up youthful energy that he released in all the wrong ways; the sort of kid that adults might have called “a bad influence.”  Maybe that was so, maybe not; at that age, everyone and everything was an influence of some kind, and Mae wouldn’t have traded Casey for the world.  
  
And these people had murdered him.  
  
Not out of passion, not out of hate, but simply because they looked at him and saw nothing of value.  Another deadbeat, delinquent kid slouching his way towards mediocrity.  Nothing to contribute.  
  
“We never pick no one who’s gonna be missed,” they had said.  But that wasn’t entirely true, was it?  
  
_None of this is happening…  
_  
As the world around her grew numb and fuzzy, flying far away from her awareness, Mae’s mind wandered back in time, to a long-ago memory and a happier day…  
  
  
  
“Hey Mae, how much you wanna bet I can grind this?”  
  
“Oh god, you’re gonna get yourself killed.”  
  
Casey stood at the top of the church steps, his ever-present skateboard in hand, looking at the steep downwards slope of the railing like it was a challenge to be overcome.  
  
He looked at a lot of life that way; everything was a chance for glory, no matter how hazardous or inglorious the achievement in question.  This wouldn’t be the first time Casey had risked life and limb for something that hardly mattered.  
  
“Not me,” he said, his voice dripping with youthful overconfidence.  “I’m indestructible.  I’m bound for glory!”  
  
“There’s like 9 in 10 odds that you’ll be bound for a hospital if you try this, dude.”  
  
“Mae,” he complained, rolling his eyes in exaggerated annoyance.  “To borrow a phrase from your nerd shit: “Never tell me the odds.””  
  
“To borrow another phrase, “I have a bad feeling about this.”  Also, Star Wars isn’t nerd shit!  It’s super cool!  There’s robots and spaceships and adventure!  Why are you even quoting something you’ve never watched?!”  
  
“Nerrrrrd…shiiiiit.”  
  
She punched him in the arm in playful frustration.  “You’d like it if you actually watched it.”  
  
“Tell you what,” he said, eyeing the railing as if calculating angles and distance.  “If I fuck up this trick and live to tell about it, I’ll watch your dumb space movie with you.  But if I nail this baby then you gotta admit that it’s nerd shit.”  
  
“You’re on, dude.  That’s a solid bet.  Especially since there’s a 0% chance that you won’t fuck it up.”  
  
“Never…”  
  
He broke into a run, throwing the skateboard down on the ground beside him and hopping skillfully onto it.  
  
“Tell me…”  
  
He kicked his foot against the ground, building up speed as he hurtled towards the top of the stairs.  
  
“The odds!!!”  
  
With a practiced flick, the board and Casey both jumped up into the air, landing on the railing and speeding precariously downwards, carried by the unstoppable forces of gravity, momentum, and teenage recklessness.  
  
“Casey!!”  Mae shouted, running after him, but it was too late to stop him.  He was flying, board grinding down the rail, perfectly balanced, his arms out, keeping him steady.  The wind was in his face, flattening his orange fur, and he was grinning like an idiot, a rush of adrenaline supercharging his body, making him feel intensely, vividly _alive_.  
  
Mae saw him wobble, his arms flailing, and she knew what was going to happen a moment before it did.   
  
The board flew out from under him, and Casey went head over heels into thin air, flung along by his own momentum down the last remaining flight of stairs, until he hit the pavement with a heavy thud, bounced, rolled, and lay still.  
  
“Oh my god – Casey!”  
  
Mae sprang down the stairs after him at a speed that was almost hazardous itself, her eyes locked on her friend’s prone form, terrified that he would never move again.  
  
His unexpected little stunt had caught some attention, and by the time she reached him a crowd of pedestrians had already rushed over.  She shoved her way through them to Casey’s side, pushing at him with her paws in a panic.  
  
“Casey!  Pleasebeokaypleasebeokaypleasebeokay!”  
  
“Uggghhhh,” he groaned, stirring.  “S’all right, I’m still here.”  
  
“CASEY!”  Mae’s face lit up with a big smile of relief, and she threw herself into a tight hug.  
  
“Owwwww!” he shouted, and she retracted herself from him in alarm, looking concerned.  He was holding his arm and grimacing in pain.  “Think I broke something.”  
  
“You’re lucky you didn’t break your neck!” she shouted, throwing her arms up in the air.  The initial wave of relief was quickly turning to disbelieving anger.  “YOU COULD HAVE DIED!”  
  
“Yeah…” he said, grinning up at her through the pained look on his face.  “Pretty awesome, huh?”  
  
“NO!  NOT AWESOME!  YOU’RE AN ASSHOLE!”  
  
“Heh.”  He wouldn’t wipe that idiot smile off his face.  “That’s sweet that you care.”  
  
“Aaaargh!  Someone help me get this moron to a doctor!”

Having limited options for medical care is one of the drawbacks of living in a tiny town like Possum Springs, but on the plus side, there’s less time spent in the waiting room; smaller population, fewer dramatic injuries to attend to on any given day.  In fact, Casey quite livened up the afternoon at the clinic.  Dr. Hank may have been a jack of all trades and a master of few, but fortunately for Casey he was pretty good with broken bones.

It was only later that evening, at Casey’s house, when his arm was safely in a cast and the excitement was over, that Mae would speak to him again.  She was still mad at his recklessness, but any reprimanding she could dish out paled in comparison to the earful he’d gotten from his parents.  And there had been one moment that had gone some way to making up for it; when Casey’s parents had turned their ire towards Mae for not stopping him, and he had quickly jumped in to deflect the responsibility back to himself (“It’s not Mae’s fault, mom, she tried to talk me out of it”).  She couldn’t be too mad after that.  
  
“Thanks for taking a parental bullet for me there.”  
  
“Wasn’t nothing.  Pretty sure I’m grounded for like a month, though.”  
  
“I’ll still see you at school though, right?”  
  
“Yeah, go figure; apparently groundings don’t apply to school.  But I won’t be able to stick around to hang afterwards for a while.”  
  
“Well at least you’re alive!”  
  
“There is that.”  
  
Casey was lying on the couch, sprawled out carelessly, all gangly limbs (one now covered in plaster), Mae sitting by his head.  They were watching TV, some silly comedy talk show, but neither was really focused on it.  
  
“I’m glad you didn’t die, dude,” she said.  
  
“Tell that to my arm.”  
  
“I’m pretty sure your arm is still alive.”  
  
“Nah, it’s like, at least half dead.”  
  
“Dude, does that make you like part zombie?”  
  
“Totally.  I’m in like, a different state of being now.  I have seen the other side and returned, but the experience has scarred me.  I am not the man I once was.”  
  
She rolled her eyes, smiling.  He could be so overdramatic.  “What’s like, the zombie equivalent of a cyborg?," she asked.  "Like, half alive, half not?”  
  
“Hmmm,” he considered.  “Zomborg?”  
  
“Cybie,” she offered.  
  
Casey snorted.  “ _Cybie?_ ”  
  
"Shut your face.  I am contributing to this conversation.”  
  
He laughed.  “We’re definitely going with “zomborg.””  
  
“If I die," Mae said, "I wanna come back as a zomborg.”  
  
“We’ll do it!  Gregg and I will make like, a mechanical heart or something out of bike parts.  Fix your corpse right up.”  
  
“Awww, you’d do that for me?”  
  
“Totally!  We’ll bring your zomborg body back to life with like, electricity and shit.”  
  
“Sweeeeet.  But you gotta do it all secret like.  Then I’ll hide in the casket at the funeral, and I’ll listen to everyone get all weepy and sad over me.”  
  
“I’ll give you a nice eulogy.  “Mae Borowski was my friend.  I can’t believe she’s gone.  I literally can’t believe it.  Sometimes I can still hear her voice…””  
  
She jumped off the couch, arms raised in the air.  “And then I’ll jump out of my coffin like this and shout “I LIVE!” and everyone will scream and faint and run away!”  
  
Casey was laughing too hard to reply.  He laughed until he was wincing, his eyes watering with pain.  
  
Mae leaned over him.  “You alright, man?”  
  
“Yeah…just sore all over.  I almost died, y’know.”  
  
“Yeah, you butthead,” she said, sitting back down.  “I remember.  Thanks, by the way, for like… _not_ doing that.”  
  
“Aw, Mae, I told you: I’m indestructible.”  
  
“I am fairly certain the events of today proved you wrong there.”  
  
“Well,” he said sleepily, shifting his position on the couch.  “Don’t worry.  I’m not going anywhere.  It’ll take a lot more than that to do _me_ in.”  
  
“Hey,” Mae complained, prodding him.  “Don’t fall asleep on me.  I brought a DVD over for us.”  
  
“Oh nooooooo,” he groaned.  “I promised, didn’t I?”  
  
“Bet’s a bet,” she said, grinning.  “Gonna educate you ‘bout some culture.”  
  
“Can we watch it tomorrow?  I’m like, really wiped out.  Like, literally.”  
  
She rolled her eyes at the corny joke.  Her sense of humor must be rubbing off on him.  And people said _he_ was the bad influence.  
  
“Sure, dude.  I’ll see you tomorrow, then.”  
  
“Okay,” he said, yawning.  “I’m just gonna…sleep right here, I think.  ‘Night, Mae.”  
  
“G’night, Casey,” she said as she hopped off the couch.  
  
_Heal up fast, you big moron.  
  
  
_

There was a hole in the center of Mae’s everything, a piece of her life that she would never be able to go home to, and its name was Casey Hartley.  


  
_We did him a favor.  
  
_ Gregg, too, felt the words more than he heard them.  It felt like a punch to the head, a realization that left him literally stunned.  The casual callousness of the statement.  They killed his friend.  They _killed_ _his friend_ , and now they had the gall to _judge_ him, to talk shit about him, to make him out to have been something less than he was.  That was the worst part.  Gregg knew a few things about being irrationally hated for who you were, but these guys…they didn’t hate Casey.  They didn’t care about him one way or the other.  The way they talked about him, it was as if Casey had barely been a person in their eyes at all; they didn’t _see_ him.  It was an insult, it was salt in a wound, it was cruelty and horror and pain and he wasn’t going to let it stand, he wasn’t going to let them get away with it!!  
  
There was rage in his heart and tears in his eyes as he raised the crossbow.  
  
  


“So that’s the song, man.  What do you think?”  
  
It was a warm evening in May, and they were sitting on the stage at the unused Party Barn, waiting for Angus and Bea to arrive.  Gregg was holding a sketchbook page covered with lyrics and notes written in Casey’s scrawling handwriting, while Casey watched him intently, eager for his friend’s reaction.  
  
“This is good, dude.  This is real good.”  
  
Casey’s ears perked up.  “You think so?”  
  
“Yeah, dude,” Gregg said encouragingly.  “It’s like…raw and shit.  It’s got, like, authenticity.”  
  
Casey grinned, a mischievous look that crossed his face every time he got the urge to say something teasing (and Gregg knew he could _never_ resist that urge).  “Man, I didn’t think you knew any words that big.”  
  
Gregg snorted, more amused than insulted.  “These things rub off on you when you spend a lot of time with Angus.”  
  
“How are you and the big guy, anyway?”  
  
“We’re good.  I mean, we’re busting our asses at work, but it’s all good.  We’re on track.”  
  
“You mean for your Plan?”  
  
“Yeah.  The Big Plan.  It’s gonna be a long ways out, but we’ll get there.”  
  
Casey’s ear twitched.  “Mind if I smoke in here?”  
  
“I mean, Bea’s literally always smoking in here and also like everywhere else she goes, so sure, dude, knock yourself out.”  
  
Casey pulled a pack of cigarettes and a lighter from his pocket; although his ‘camo hoodie and jeans’ fashion style didn’t have as much pocket space as Gregg’s trademark jacket, there were a few things Casey never seemed to go anywhere without (Gregg had his knives; Casey had his smokes).  
  
He seemed distracted, though; for a while, he stared away into space with a faraway look in his eyes, leaning back against the stage, supporting his weight on one arm while the other held his cigarette.  He pursed his lips and idly blew smoke into the air.  Gregg put a lot of work into fostering his image as a Cool Dude, but for Casey, it came effortlessly; it was in the way he held himself, a loose, amiable aloofness that fit him as comfortably as his clothes.  Though he still had a cocky rebelliousness to him, he wasn’t as loud and he didn’t show off as much anymore; the years had mellowed him somewhat.  They were all of them getting older now.  
  
“Must be nice,” Casey said, finally.  
  
“What must be nice?”  
  
“Having a plan.”  
  
Gregg shot him a glance.  “I mean, you’re getting out of here one day, too, right?”  
  
“That’s just a goal, Gregg.  Or like, a hope.  It’s not the same as a plan.”  
  
“Hey, dude, if Mae can make it out of here, so can you.”  
  
“No, I can’t,” Casey said.  He sounded annoyed.  “Least not the way Mae did.  You think a guy like me with no money and shit-tier grades is ever gonna go to college?  I barely made it through high school, dude.”  
  
“Hey, never say never,” Gregg said, but he could tell even as he spoke that his attempts to be encouraging were falling flat.  “You can be whoever you wanna be, dude.”  
  
“Gregg,” said Casey.  “You’re my friend and I know you’re only trying to help, but I gotta be straight with you, man: that’s a load of bullshit and you know it.”  
  
Gregg held his tongue; he had a feeling that this was a moment for listening, not interjecting.  
  
“Some people just are what they are,” Casey continued. “And I’ve known for a while now that I’m not someone who has a bright future ahead of him.  I’m a born loser.  And I know what you’re thinking, man, but I’m not just being dramatic here.  Best I can hope for is to hop a train one day like the crusties an’ never look back.  Go wherever the tracks take me and like, I don’t know.  Make my own way, I guess.”  
  
“What about your family?”  
  
Casey shrugged. “One less mouth to feed.  I’m just a drain on them.  Can’t contribute anything, can’t even get a job.  They’d be better off without me.”  
  
“Well, I wouldn’t be!”  Gregg hadn’t intended to shout, but he couldn’t help himself.  He had cried enough the day Mae left; he couldn’t stomach the thought of Casey leaving too.  “Possum Springs without you _or_ Mae?  That would _suck_ , dude!  I’d be like, lost if I was stuck here on my own.”  
  
Casey looked surprised, even genuinely confused by the outburst.  “You’d have Angus, though.”  
  
“Angus is great, dude, but he’s not like…he’s not a replacement for anyone else.  I need _all_ you guys.”  
  
Casey smiled at him, warm and affectionate.  “That’s sweet of you, man.”  
  
They were silent for a while, staring off into space together, Casey smoking his cigarette.  “I miss Mae too,” he admitted softly.  
  
“Yeah,” Gregg agreed.  “I think we all miss Mae.”  He looked up at Casey, ears drooping a bit.  “Promise you won’t leave, dude?”  
  
“Don’t worry, buddy.  I didn’t mean I was gonna like, get up and jump on a train first thing tomorrow morning or anything.  You’re still gonna be stuck with me for a while.”  
  
“How long is a while?”  
  
“I dunno, man,” Casey said, that far-off look wandering back into his eyes.  “I really don’t know.  When you gotta leave, you gotta leave, y’know?”  
  
Gregg was about to open his mouth and say something, but just then the quiet was broken by the noise of the door opening.  Angus had finally arrived.  
  
“Sorry I’m late, Bug,” he said to Gregg.  
  
“It’s all cool, Cap’n.  Just chilling with Casey.  He wrote us a song for the band!”  
  
“Oh?”  Angus looked over at Casey, interested.  
  
“Uh, yeah!”  Casey grabbed the lyrics sheet and held it out for Angus.  “It’s called “Die Anywhere Else.”  I was hoping we could practice it tonight, if like, you’re cool with singing it.”  
  
Angus quickly read through the lyrics.  “This is pretty cool, Casey,” he said in his usual deep, mellow tone.  “Kinda morbid, though, isn’t it?  All this stuff about wanting to die?”  
  
“Ahaha,” Casey laughed sheepishly.  “I mean, it’s not really about wanting to die, exactly.  It’s about not wanting to die _here_.”  
  
“Why not say “live anywhere else,” then?”  
  
“Angus, man.  You can’t just write a song that goes “I just want to live anywhere else.” ‘Cause like, in this town that’s literally everyone.  Relatable, but like, big whoop, who cares?  But you make it “die anywhere else” and that’s different.  Then suddenly it’s got resonance.  Then it’s like, poetical.”

 

“HE WAS MY FRIEND!!!!”  
  
Gregg wasn’t a violent person, not really, despite all his knives and bravado.  But though his arms and his voice were shaking as he pointed the crossbow at the cloaked figures across the pit, his intent was clear and focused.  He had spent hours in the woods shooting at lifeless, unmoving targets; this wouldn’t be so different.  The only difference was that this time his targets had it coming.  Bang!  Right in the eye.  
  
It wasn’t the guns pointed at him that weakened his resolve and made him drop his weapon; in that moment he was beyond caring what happened to him.  It was the guns pointed at his friends.  It was Mae, in front of him, clutching herself weakly and looking dazed, not even reacting to the situation unfolding around her.  It was the sharp, tense intake of breath that he heard from Bea behind him.  It was the thought of a bullet missing him and slamming itself into Angus’ soft, gentle body.  
  
He threw the crossbow down, and hoped that Casey could forgive him.  


Mae was floating in a blurry haze of shapes and colors; her mind had fled from the horror and the pain of the mine, only to get lost in the dark.  Her friends were far away, her memories of them further still, and yet impossibly, terrifyingly, she was not alone in that darkness.  She could sense it, a soft and deadly premonition singing to her from deep in the space at the bottom of a bottomless pit, burrowing into her brain: _I’m going to die down here.  
  
_ And all she could think was that maybe, months ago, part of her already had.

 

_And if they ever hear my name  
            will they know I walked alone  
            around these dusty streets -  
            My tired old home.  
            And will they ever stop to think  
            what was here before, no -  
            They won’t remember that I’m gone._


End file.
